Google News Australia and Google News OneBoxes in the focus – A visibility analysis for September
14. October 2016It’s time for another visibility analysis in Australia. How did the news publishers perform in Google News and the Google News OneBoxes in September? We will answer this question in the following analysis. Similar to our first analysis for Australia, we used the KPI Dashboard data from the Trisolute News Dashboard.
First, we are focusing on the visibility in Google News. As a reminder, last month theaustralian.com.au, abc.net.at, news.com.au, inquisitr.com and smh.com.au were the news publishers with the highest visibility in Google News. In August, smh.com.au was the news publisher with the highest visibility through almost the whole month. Let’s take a look at how September worked for these news publishers.
It is almost the same picture in September. Again, smh.com.au had the highest visibility in Google News and beat its competitors clearly. Only one day, the news publisher got beaten by news.com.au. Congratulations for this strong performance. After smh.com.au, news.com.au performed better than abc.net.au through September. In August, both news publishers competed for the second position and changed positions a lot. This month, news.com.au was leading most of the days. Still, both news publishers were above the average and performed very well. Theaustralian.com.au is on the fourth position again. Unlike the month before, theage.com.au is in the Top Five, instead of inquistr.com. All in all, the news publishers in the Top Five performed better on Google News than the month before. The average line of the Top Five in September is a little bit higher than in August (from around 7% to around 8%). That is a good result.
Afterwards we analysed the visibility in Google News; our focus is now on the visibility in the Google News OneBoxes. Last month, abc.net.au was clearly the winner. The news publisher got beaten by its competitors on two days only.
Like in August, we find the same five news publishers in September’s Top Five. Abc.net.au won the Google News OneBoxes again. This news publisher only got beaten by smh.com.au on the 30th of September. On the second place is smh.com.au again, but not as clear as a month before. On several days, The Sydney Morning Herald got beaten by news.com.au. News.com.au performed well on the last 30 days of September as well. Compared to the Top Three, theguardian.com and theaustralian.com.au did not perform as good as them, but still pretty good compared to the competitors outside the Top Five. Just like in our analysis of Google News, all news publishers performed better than last month. The average went up from 15% to around 16%.
Next, we focus on the “publishing rate”. In September, the Top Five didn’t change compared to August.
News.com.au is definitely the strongest news publisher when it comes to the “publishing rate”. With 383 articles on the 1st of September, the news publisher beats its own highest number of articles (375 articles) from the month before. And smh.com.au is still the news publisher with the lowest rate of indexed articles in Google News (keep the good ranking results above in mind). Dailytelegraph.com.au and theaustralian.com.au produced along average and abc.net.au increased its publishing rate compared to the month before. This news publisher performed definitely over the average.
Finally, we want to take a look at the category “distribution” in Google News for news.com.au, smh.com.au and abc.net.au. This shows in which category each news publisher performed best. As a reminder, the different Google News categories are “Top Stories”, “World”, “Australia”, “Business”, “Technology”, “Entertainment”, “Sports”, “Science” and “Health”. In the following chart, we see the category “distribution” of news.com.au:
As we can see in this chart, news.com.au was best in the categories “Entertainment”, “World” and “Health”. In these categories, news.com.au had the highest visibility. Compared to these results, abc.net.au performed really strong in the category “Australia”. And smh.com.au was very strong in the categories “Business”, “Top Stories” and “Sport”.
To sum it up, the analysis shows that the results of September are quite similar to the results of August. Smh.com.au performed really well again on Google News and the News Boxes during September. The Sydney Morning Herald won in Google News, but got beaten by abc.net.au, and sometimes by news.com.au, in the Google News Boxes. As it was shown in this as well as in the last analysis, The Sydney Morning Herald had a relatively low publishing rate. It’s still interesting that this news publisher beat their competitors with fewer articles. In September, they did a great Google News SEO job again. Abc.net.au did also a great job. The news publisher performed very well on Google News and at the News Boxes. They had an average publishing rate and also covered the most important topics. In Google News and Google News Box, news.com.au performed better than the month before. The other news publishers (theaustralian.com.au, theage.com.au, dailytelegraph.com.au, theguardian.com) performed quite okay, but can’t compete with the other three in September. Theage.com.au had a higher visibility than in August and therefore pushed inqusitr.com out of the Top Five in Google News. Generally, all news publishers performed better than in the month before. Beside our analysis for the desktop SERP, we will also focus on the Mobile SERP in our next analysis for October.